The Australian Fiancé

By Simone Lazaroo, Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd: 2000, , paperback, $28.00. Reviewed by Fiona Probyn in the Dec 2001-Jan 2002 issue.

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Love stories are like stories of nation building in that both rely on a fantasy of (unachievable) unity with/through the loved object, be it the nation or a man/woman. Simone Lazaroo's The Australian Fiancé is both a love story and a story of nation-building where the obstacles in the way of the lovers are no less than the Japanese occupation of Singapore (the protagonist has been imprisoned as a 'comfort woman'), and the white Australia policy.

The lovers in the novel are named only in a way that highlights their estrangement from themselves and each other. The narrator is called 'the Eurasian woman', 'the young woman', 'she' and 'I', while 'he' is 'the Australian fiancé', taking the book title but remaining elusive nonetheless.

The narrative switches from first to third person mode throughout, with neither narrative position able to capture a protagonist who describes herself as 'so transparent I am almost not there' (176). Both characters are nebulous; this is clearly deliberate and expertly achieved. For the Eurasian woman it highlights her attempts to overcome, forget or unremember her experiences of imprisonment, forced prostitution and her and her mother's shame. For him, it suggests the blankness of his whiteness and the instabilities of place; his Broome home is called Elsewhere; a name evoking white Australian fantasies of where they are and where they long to be.

The relationship between the Eurasian and Australian fiancé is referred to as 'a new country', 'a land of forgetting' (191), these terms linking the love story with the story of nation-building but also serving as comment on the fantasy state (equivalent to terra nullius) that lovers hope to find each other in. The Australian fiancé takes the Eurasian woman back to Broome, Western Australia, and on arrival she is asked '[w]hat percentage of you's European blood?' (80). She is allowed to stay in the country on the basis of a certificate of exemption and 'a gentleman's agreement', which is precisely how the white Australia policy functions; not necessarily as a single discrete statement, but as a series of legislative provisos which enables racial monitoring.

Arthur Calwell and the official at the dock have a 'gentleman's agreement' about who is allowed in and The Australian fiancé and the official at the dock have their own 'gentleman's agreement' between them. The Eurasian (as she is called in this section), is merely the 'tolerated' subject of the agreement and the Australian fiancé reassures the official that he will make sure that she 'doesn't do anything too foreign' (81), thus articulating the white supremacist nature of this kind of tolerance that underwrites the policy of multiculturalism according to its critics; she is allowed in to the country yes, but continually reminded that she is there as long as she is not 'herself' (that is, culturally different).

Citation

• Fiona Probyn. 'Review: The Australian Fiancé by Simone Lazaroo' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), Dec 2001-Jan 2002. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 18 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Singapore, 1949. A young Eurasian woman, a survivor of the Japanese Occupation, meets the son of a privileged Australian family. She accompanies him to one of his parents' homes in Broome with hope for a better life, despite doubts from her family.

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